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Travelling 'Torture Caravan' Disturbing Sign of the Times
While inquiry meets in private, tortured trio bring tales of terror to small-town Ontario
It is a bizarre feeling -- eating, walking, laughing with men who have been hung from their wrists and beaten with electric cables. To see them behave so normally despite their experiences is a bit destabilizing.
But for five days, that is what I did, as three men -- Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin and Ahmad El Maati -- travelled from small town to small town, telling Canadians their stories and pushing for a public inquiry into what happened to them.
All three men -- Canadian citizens, but also Arab and Muslim -- were detained and tortured in a Syrian prison on unproven suspicions of terrorism. They accuse the Canadian government of complicity in their torture. None has ever been charged with a crime.
Toronto-based Nureddin, for example, had fled his homeland of Iraq in 1991. As as a Turkman, he was discriminated against under Saddam Hussein's regime. When the regime was toppled in 2003, Nureddin decided to go back to visit family he had not seen in nine years. On his way back to Canada, he was stopped on the Iraq-Syria border and thrown into jail. During questioning, he was asked the same questions by his Syrian torturers that he had been asked months before by a Canadian security intelligence official - a sign, he says, that the questions must have originated from Canada.
The stories of these men echo that of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was detained and tortured in the same infamous prison in Syria. He has since received an official apology from the Canadian government and $10 million in compensation after a public inquiry established that his torture was due in part to information the RCMP shared internationally, falsely identifying him as a terrorist.
The report that emerged from that inquiry found that the RCMP sent questions about one of the other men, Ottawa engineer Almalki, to Syrian interrogators knowing that questioning could result in torture.
A second inquiry is now looking into the role Canadian officials played in these three cases, but it is being conducted in almost-total secrecy. The men themselves, their lawyers, the public and the media are not allowed to attend. They have seen no documents and cross-examined no witnesses.
This has caused endless frustration for Almalki, Nureddin and El Maati, who are still trying to recover from the emotional and psychological scars of their torture abroad -- only to face a new struggle upon returning to Canada.
"For me, this inquiry is another form of torture because I don't know what's going on," El Maati said. "My life is on the line; my reputation is on the line."
And so one rainy day in May, these men, along with about 30 other regular Canadians, set off on a week-long caravan to try to do something about it. Organized by a group called Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture, the caravan travelled from Toronto to Ottawa to raise awareness about these cases and build momentum for a public inquiry. It was an interesting bunch of people, to say the least.
There was Dick, the retired engineer and former Roman Catholic priest who had just turned 82. There was Tracy, the civil rights junkie who pulled her 13-year-old daughter out of school for a week to join the caravan, because, "What's better than a civil rights march?" And there were Vidya, Frank and their 10-month-old baby; the couple saw a random email about the caravan and decided it was too important an issue not to participate.
Reactions were varied when people saw the group sporting bright orange jumpsuits kneeling on the pavement, their bowed heads covered in black hoods, their hands behind their backs -- now a worldwide symbol of torture.
Some wanted no part of it. "I'm the torturer!" one Correctional Services Canada staff screamed mockingly as she drove past the group's silent vigil outside a maximum-security prison in Bath, Ont.
Others were eager to hear more. In many of the mostly white, middle-class towns we travelled through, passersby had no idea that this alleged "Canadian torture" even existed. They had never heard of Maher Arar, let alone any of the others who have undergone similar ordeals.
Still, support was surprisingly high. At Trenton, home to a Canadian Forces Base, one soldier signed the petition asking the Prime Minister to make the inquiry public. In Cobourg, three high-school classes gave the men a standing ovation after hearing their stories.
"Ahmad. Muayyed," one high-school teacher repeated to himself as he walked down the hallways of his school. "I'm practising the names," he said with a chuckle.
And just as it was destabilizing for me to watch these men connect with the public on such a personal level, it was destabilizing for them, too. After so many months in isolation, seeing how much people cared was a bit overwhelming.
"Part of the healing process as a torture victim is to be recognized," Nureddin told me after lunch one day as we sat in the basement of a church hosting us in Napanee. "The public has recognized us. That recognition means they trust in (my) story." That was a first for Nureddin, who until then had shied away from sharing his experience publicly.
In September, retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, who is overseeing the latest inquiry, will release his findings. Only a summary of the report will be public. The government argues more disclosure would pose a risk to national security.
But for Almalki, getting answers is essential -- not just for him, but for all Canadians.
"It's extremely important that we get to know the full truth of what happened to all of us. That is because ... it looks like it is a pattern. It's not just one case or two cases or three cases," he told a crowd gathered at Kingston's Public Library.
"This doesn't just affect me and my family or Muslims. It affects all of us. It defines who we are as a country."
It seems their call for some answers is being met with a sympathetic ear from Canadians. Consider these thoughts from some of the people we met along the way:
"I think you're doing us all a favour," Kevin Doyle said at a public lecture in Ottawa. "What happened to you is a change in North American society that is detrimental to all of us. Many of us who were born here are afraid of what's ahead. You give us the courage to do more to counteract this."
"For the first time in my life, I'm ashamed to be Canadian," high-school teacher Gary O'Dwyer told his students in Cobourg.
"I'm so disturbed," one lady said after hearing Almalki speak in Kingston. "I don't even want to think about it."
But that's just it. She has to. We all do. And the government certainly should.
Heba Aly is an Ottawa-based freelance journalist.
© Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2008
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17 Comments so far
Show AllWas any of this journey covered in the main stream media?
Hey Harper, why don't you scrape the egg off your face and do the right thing here.
I can't imagine this sort of thing being received so well in the US. The shouting Correctional Services Canada person would seem minor compared to what would be encountered in the US, and high schools wouldn't even allow such a thing on their grounds at all. Many students and teachers would be so disruptive against the torture victims that it would be impossible for them to proceed if they were allowed into a school. There is widespread support for torture among Americans. Many love it, would like to participate in it and be as sadistic and dominating as the violent characters lionized on their TV programs and in their movies.
I know you are exactly right deang. People with souls feel ashamed to be US Citizens, not to say human animals. The kind you are referring to feel like a party is going on and they want an invitation.
I believe we are all capable of abandoning ourselves to the lust for blood. That is why the best advice I ever heard,(from a mother in a in a fast food restaurant to her child) PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU ARE DOING, is so important.
Buddha insisted that we must give our full attention to whatever we are doing. He called it Right Mindfulness. I don't think so many people could do it if they really were paying attention, and were fully aware that it was they, and not their country or their fellow jailers or anyone other than themselves who were fully responsible for their actions.
The fact that so many of them later have nightmares and PTSD is evidence that they were unable to carry out torture without dissociating from themselves. Others, of course, the sociopaths, cherish fond memories of having caused another person pain.
Being a jailer is like being president: Anybody who wants the job probably should not have it.
NIETZSCHE: Good posting, and I appreciate your relating the Buddha. Of course the LAW of karma is a central tenet of Buddhism. In our deranged modern society crime DOES appear to pay... there are so few role models of basic goodness. Whereas Hollywood once championed the quiet right action of Jimmy Stewart, today it's the sexy gun play of a Clint Eastwood, or the punch of Rocky Stallone. I.e. Force! If the law of karma was properly understood, then in addition to mindfulness, the realization that one's actions, if taken AGAINST another, will rebound to cause the self harm would be a pretty good basis for a system of deterence. Instead, in the US if someone kills and is charged with murder, he will probably be killed. Eye for an eye, primitive "justice," but the real Truth is seen in a nation that spends what this one does on armaments, then must conjure plans to use the weapons so as to have "cause" to replace "inventories" to keep the military-industrial complex financially "happy." Martin Luther King nailed it... a nation that spends more on armaments than lunch programs (and programs of social uplift FOR the people) approaches spiritual death. Small wonder that the zealous churches and zionist synagogues lead the way to war. Sicko II.
I am so ashamed of this Bush Regime. But the karma will return. One of the signs I hold up on the street corner... "Torture does not become us."
Truth of this sort is not allowed in the United States. In the 70's I viewed a film made by a Canadian news team who were aboard a 60' sailboat that carried a ton or so of medical supplies into Hanoi Harbor during the time Nixon was denying we were bombing that city. The filmed proof of our bombing appeared much like the atom bomb devastation of WWII. Interestingly, the sailboat was named 'Spirit of Hiroshima' and was the first boat built there after we bombed them. The crew interestingly enough was in part exiles from Peru, due to our help with assinating Alliende. As I mentioned, Inconvenient Truth is not allowed in my country. That film to my knowledge ever been shown in the US except to small groups, advertized by word of mouth.
Veteran '66-68
In September, retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, who is overseeing the latest inquiry, will release his findings. Only a summary of the report will be public. The government argues more disclosure would pose a risk to national security.
What they really mean is that it might disclose some of the secretive dealings that are part and parcel of their traitorous involvement in the so-called North American Security and Prosperity Partnership. Their behind-the-scenes 'security' deal making must be kept under wraps and out of the public spotlight at all costs. I wonder if they've integrated CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) yet.
If it is true that many Canadians had never even heard of the Maher Arar case, I fear that they may be becoming as ill-informed as many USans. Such inattention to a significant indicator of malfeasance on both sides of the border does not bode well for either country's future wellbeing.
At least these guys are back home. None of the US citizens or visa holders are. In fact, we don't know what happened to them and probably never will.
'Disappearing' sucks.
As a Canadian I can say honestly there was NO coverage of this anywhere on the Canadian media.
This whole charade of being a 'human rights respecting democracy' started with PM Jean Cretien, continued under the two PMs who followed.
All I can say is; at least canada doesn't have the USA/PATRIOT act.
deang June 9th, 2008 3:17 pm
Were we always this way? I know we always taught our children pack behavior in school, taught them how to single out their targets (somebody in poor shape to fight back), and then nail them and beat them and torture them - FOR THE PLEASURE OF HEARING SOMEONE HELPLESS SCREAM. Way back in the 50's. Fully sanctioned by ALL to teach the victims their place. Then they run like hell and protest their innocence when the kid commits suicide. Then after they get away with it, they sneer and call the kid "A loser". My America.
Have we changed? Are we different from our grandparents who burned black people alive and mutilated their sexual parts in the town square - and MADE IT A FAMILY PICNIC?
Are we different from our great grandparents who invited indigenous people to dinner as a sign of "good faith" and then poisoned their food with arsenic and laughed at them in their death throes? So they could steal their land of course.
Don't tell me it never happened. WE DID THAT. WE ARE DOING THE SAME TODAY. WE LIKE IT. GROWS AMERICA A CHUBBY. I wonder how those sadistic screaming children will feel when they go home and have nothing to eat? Unified? Or divided even more?
We are a degraded and debased people. Historically fire is the purgative. You know, like those megaton gas bombs detonated at 100' wiping out all life. 3000 miles of smoking rubble. People who had no mercy will find none.
Sorry it's basic geometry. If you stand in the rain without an umbrella you are going to get wet. Faith alone will not suffice. It appears to have begun raining in our Perfect little Storm. Got your umbrella? This is going to be a very big ugly. Did you lose your umbrella? Shouldn't have done that. You're going to have to kill someone to get another. It's the American way. Our streets are built on the bones of our victims. Our homes are built on massed graveyards of the dead we put there. Some will call it Justice.
Peece.
Until such time that the perpetrators of these horrendous deeds are required to pay a sacrifice equal to or exceeding that which they done to others, there will be no solution! Put a few of these thugs up against a firing party and things will begin to turn around. By the way that includes enabling politicians and military officers, and of course business men involved in the profiteering etc.
Siouxrose, thanks for the mlk reference. just found a great resource here http://www.mlkonline.net/quotes.html
How foolish to imagine that torture is approved by ordinary people in the US! No, the great majority of Americans are sickened by what we are learning about the atrocities committed by the Bush administration. George Bush promised us "shock and awe", and that is what we got -- the average, ordinary citizen IS "shocked and awed" to see how grotesque our government has become, and how far this country has fallen in a few short years. And it appears that our elected officials have been fully complicit with the Bush agenda. The token "protests" of certain legislators have been utterly meaningless, and they have violated their oaths of office in their refusal to uphold the law and protect the US Constitution.
There HAVE (throughout) been large protests and outrage, but it takes some effort to find out about them. It wasn't difficult to figure out that the greatest gains made in the US from the 1930's through to the early-70's depended on having a people's news media. Step by step, since the early 1980's, we saw the media completely taken over by right-wing corporate interests. Today, the media is terrified that reporting the degree of opposition to the outrages of the Bush administration would lead to a wide-spread, organized uprising. And they are probably right.
But in spite of the mainstream media's complicity with Bush and his followers, word gets out, and the anger among the masses of ordinary people has been growing by the day.
I don't know if Americans will finally rise up to take our country back. For a complex range of reasons, people feel numbed, frightened of the direction we're going, and have a sense that everything has flown out of control. Oddly, there seems to be no leaders among us, and no movement can move without leaders, but maybe some will step forward.
Whatever happens, my point here is that Americans absolutely, unconditionally, do NOT approve of the Nazi-like agenda of Bush & Co. "We the People" just seem to be ludicrously impotent today.
dfabin0, Refer to the human behavior experiments at Stanford in 1971. The researcher, Phillip Zimbardo was surprised too.
Buddhism is fine as far as superstitions go, but they are fighting birth control too.
Reminds me of the way Germans were introduced to concentration camps at the end of WWII - many were still in denial (and some survivors still are, to this very day). But enough 'saw the light' and swore 'never again' as the rest of us, disgusted by what had happened, were determined to avoid such State-sponsored tyranny, cruelty, and sadism to occur ever again. All that global sympathy ended in Palestine - so much for 'never again' - 'never' didn't last all that long. And let's not forget the US' hearty support for Franco's regime in Spain... and all those 'anti-communist' purges - including CIA orders to one Saddam Hussein, among others...
Alas, even before the end of WWII, the US and some of its 'allies' were already painting 'communism' - then a euphamism for 'socialism' - as the subhuman ultimate 'enemy' - and plenty of people whole-heartedly agreed. (Patton was notorious for swallowing the Nazi swill of the 'threat' of 'communism' - and much of Europe was equally frightened, although they did not confuse Stalin's paranoid tyranny with socialism.) Americans were not as astute - but they didn't experience fascism first-hand. Now they'll get their chance...
Trying to organize liberals (even progressives) is like herding cats - too easily distracted. That's why you need humane, responsible, well-educated traditional conservatives in your ranks - but too many of you resist us, as if 'we' were the 'enemy' - and we are not. Believe me, you'll recognize the real enemy when he comes calling - and already many of you fear your own government - a sign of despotism that too many Americans and Canadians still deny. Your day is coming - your eyes will be opened - I just hope we can still fight back.